The Girl With the Metronome Heart

A lot of metronome practice this week, as if I could find comfort in the steady, even beat, the tempo where the piece is within my grasp and the challenge is to make the beat so real it is a container into which everything else must fit exactly.

It used to seem monotonous, metronome practice. The mechanicalness of it, the fingers like machinery moving not by will but by exactitude. Art, I decided, would be its opposite, to bend the beat and refuse its tyranny, to hesitate, trembling, here and submit to a fury of emotion racing through those sixteenths. To refuse to color within the lines because it was all about expression.

Precision and control now seem prior to, somehow, I guess, or themselves a part of expression.

*

This number-changing season, which even I must track via the numbers in the journal each morning, pushes time to the forefront. This week, free of any obligations except caring for a friend’s cat, I have felt outside of time, but I notice that I get grumpy without my routines, even as I try to be flexible around the needs of everyone around me. I worry about making time count. Marvel at how elastic it seems as I press forward along it, how it whips in behind me like the retractible cord on the vacuum cleaner when I was a child, which I could again and again tug just to the point where it would go flying out of my hand.

*

Fantasy this summer, in the pool, in solitude nothing to hear except my own breath bubbling past my ears and nothing to see except the blue murk in front of me: should the universe disappear while I am in the pool, does my head not contain enough information about how it works that I could recreate it. Okay, maybe not internal combustion engines, but the way people conform to certain laws, even the way they surprise you, the way ecosystems function and how to lay out cities and homes and countries. Or would I be like the child who tries to draw a tree by drawing each leaf until there isn’t room on the page for the trunk?

So with my past. I lay out little fragments and snippets of memory and wonder how all of them could fit back together into the neat package of a timeline, how could all of that possibly be contained in a mere thirty-seven years? Especially when so many stretches of time have felt like driving through southern New Mexico, the land with its endless cattle fences and scraggly vegetation dipping and rising like power lines with no real landmarks for mile after mile until one is numb with the rhythm, the truly monotonous slipping past of the dashed line in the center of the highway, nothing to distinguish this day from the day before, or this Tuesday from last Tuesday, this New Year’s from last year’s.

*

So back to Hippocrates, ars longa and vita brevis, the relationship between art and time. Raven and I have a conversation after he saw the new Tron movie with the boys and there’s a virtual character, an artificial intelligence that occupies himself with reading and I wonder if artificial intelligences would read when they could upload texts and have instantaneous knowledge of them. Of course, the information in a book could be instantaneously, but reading takes time. Different amounts of time for different people, of course, and sometimes I wish I could read faster, envy those who devour and retain books as I cannot, but even there there lingers a wondering if the brevity of life adds value to the choices. And if the experience of a book over time isn’t like the experience of music over time, measured, allowing for transformation. That the “information” in music could also be instantaneously uploaded to an artificial intelligence, the key, the themes, the harmonies, the developments, but that this would quite different from the experience of listening and being brought to tears. Or whatever.

*

One would be stingy with time, would hoard it. Would at least be prudent about how one spends it. And still in the end what is one left with but a stack of notebooks, a handful of dust? I try to tack one sentence to another here, to forge enough quiet in the house that I can concentrate on this one brief task and there is a son asking for attention, a question about plans for this quiet new year’s eve, a sharing about what he is reading right now, and I bruise myself with my brusqueness. So I imagine the next several minutes, the pushing the “publish” button and closing the laptop, going over and cuddling next to him, to not quite finish the 92nd book I’ve read this year (so close I came to my round 100!) as we wait for his father and brother to get home from the grocery store so we can cook together, listen to a podcast together, play games and be a little reflective, a little celebratory and go to bed early. This is the currency I divest myself of, the small choice I have.